Eugene Levy has quietly been one of the most major players in comedy, starring in the American Pie franchise, Cheaper By The Dozen 2 , A Mighty Wind , Best In Show , Waiting for Guffman , and most recently, Schitt’s Creek .
While he has been around for ages, how well do we really know him? Here are some lesser-known facts about Eugene!
Eugene Levy is one of the most well known comedic actors in Hollywood.
If you didn’t already know him, his role in Schitt’s Creek means that you most definitely know him now.
He is a great actor and a great human being.
However, just because we love watching him on screen, that doesn’t mean we know everything about him!
Thankfully, we are here to help with that.
Here are a ton of great facts about the actor! It’s time to learn more about him!
1. He hates dancing.
“My wife and I discovered early on in our marriage that neither one of us likes dancing. When we realized we don’t have to dance if we don’t want to, that was a big breakthrough for us,” he said in an interview with Chatelaine .
2. He is Canadian.
Eugene, 73, was born on December 17, 1946 in a small Canadian port city on the western tip of Lake Ontario called Hamilton.
He started his acting career in Canada, starring in a sketchy comedy show known as SCTV .
3. His son, *Schitt’s Creek* star Dan Levy, was once his boss.
He revealed to Chatelaine that, although Dan was_technically_ his boss, they have more of a partnership.
Eugene is so proud of Dan for how far he has come in the business.
4. He had the “birds and bees” talk with his son, Dan Levy, when he was 10 years old.
“I remember he was maybe 10 or 11. I started to get into the birds and the bees with young Dan, and he quickly put his hands over his ears and said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ I remember thinking at the time, this is so funny. His reaction was just, ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhh,'” he told Chatelaine .
5. He doesn’t consider himself to be much of a comedian.
“I’m not a stand-up, naturally funny person,” he told CBC .
“I don’t look at the world through a comedic prism. The laughs that I get are through character. You just dive into a character and try to become the character and then, the moments are real moments.”
6. He thinks that in 40 years, people will consume television via microchip.
“It’s probably going to be in some kind of implanted microchip. You can be using your brain and then all of a sudden something will drop in front of your eyes. I don’t know. I don’t know how anybody can watch television on a watch,” he told Chatelaine .
7. He is close friends with Steve Martin.
And it’s really no surprise!
Eugene and Steve have starred alongside each other in three movies: Father of the Bride in 1991, Bringing Down the House in 2003, and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 in 2005.
8. He believes that *Schitt’s Creek* ended perfectly.
Once the show picked up momentum, it might have been tempting to drag on for another few seasons.
But Eugene told CBC that the series ended in a very natural way and there was no sense in forcing more out of the storyline.
“It ended when it should’ve ended,” he told *Good Morning America*.
“We’ll never reach this kind of peak again with 15 Emmy nominations. That was just mind-blowing,” he continued .
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“I give a lot of credit to my son Dan. He did a masterful job of guiding this thing to its final destination. We started the show and the intention was to make a great character comedy.”
9. He lacked confidence at the beginning of his career.
In an interview with Backstage , he admitted that he spent a large part of his acting career feeling insecure about the way that he looked and lacking confidence.
He also revealed that he would use props, disguises, and outfit changes to change his appearance.
“I’ve spent my career, certainly, having no confidence in myself, so I would try anything I could to not be myself. Changing my appearance was important to me in terms of being a character and trying to get laughs through that character,” he said.
“Every time I looked too much like myself, I’d get an uneasy feeling, like, ‘I need something—give me a mustache !’”
10. He used to skip school to act.
“Come the end of the year, I wasn’t going to make my year because I hadn’t been to class,” he recalled to Backstage .
“I had to go back to all of my professors and say, ‘Look, I’ve got to be honest with you: I’ve been doing a lot of acting. I haven’t gone to class. Tell me what books I need to read and what I don’t need to read.”
“‘If you can tell me that, I might be able to get through my finals,'” he went on.
“Half the professors said , ‘OK, don’t read this, don’t do this, only focus on this.’ And the other half, with delight, said, ‘You are in trouble, my friend.'”
11. While he contemplated dropping out of college altogether to pursue acting, he managed to stick it out until the end.
Juggling acting and school wasn’t an easy thing for Eugene, but he told himself that he would finish what he had started.
“I went back and said, ‘No, I’ve got to do this right for my family. I’ve got to make my year,'” he said.
“The idea of quitting school , dropping out, or failing was just not an option. So I went back to do it right.”
12. He often had trouble staying in character as Johnny Rose on *Schitt’s Creek*.
“It’s hard to not laugh a lot of times. That’s true. I would credit Chris Elliott with doing his best to kick me off that high wire of straightness. But I have to say, it was an exciting choice for me to do that, to play straight, because it’s not what I’ve been doing in my career.”
“I always found the closer I get to playing a character that looks like me, the less confidence I had going on camera for all those years. So that’s why I just played characters that just had a particular look to them because it was more comfortable for me and I felt more confident playing characters that looked completely different.”
“But this was something that was exciting from the get-go to play the character that keeps the storyline going, that keeps everything grounded. I was very excited to do that. And I mean, ain’t that the irony that for the first time in my life, I have two acting nominations, Emmy-wise, for this character. So something kind of clicked there. I got comfortable playing somebody who looks like me.”
13. He recognizes how important *Schitt’s Creek* is to people.
He, among many others in the cast, have mentioned that they have received many letters talking about how important David and Patrick’s story was for them to come out to their parents.
14. He prefers playing characters that the audience can get emotionally involved with.
“That’s just the kind of comedy I’ve always been attracted to. You have to have the audience emotionally involved, no matter what it is or how broad it is,” he told Backstage .
“If you can do that, if you can hook the audience and have them care about your character, then you have the option of going a lot of different ways with how you want to tell a story, or how funny or not funny you want to be.”
“You can create the kind of comedy that has such an emotional underbelly to it that you make the audience feel things they never thought they would.”
Do you know any other interesting facts about the talented Eugene Levy?
Or were you pleasantly surprised by all the facts in the article?
Either way, let us know down below in the comment section! We would love to hear from you!
